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Amazon EC2 vs Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.4
Investing in Amazon EC2 offers cost savings, operational efficiency, flexibility, and scalability, reducing traditional server management and expenses.
Sentiment score
6.0
Organizations saved resources and infrastructure costs with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling, achieving over 50% ROI in high-load applications.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
Amazon EC2 support varies; premium users often praise responsiveness, while free support users experience slower responses and mixed satisfaction.
Sentiment score
7.3
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is praised for its responsive support, though third-party integration challenges suggest vendor collaboration improvements.
I would rate the technical support of AWS a nine, as their team resolves issues effectively and meets our expectations.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Amazon EC2 is praised for its robust, flexible, and cost-efficient scalability features, despite some challenges with instance updates.
Sentiment score
7.5
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers flexible, scalable solutions, efficiently managing resources to meet varied demands and simplifying operations.
The scaling feature appears to be embedded in the Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling price.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.0
Amazon EC2 is highly reliable, offering features like auto-scaling and load balancing to ensure stability and dependability.
Sentiment score
8.1
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is stable and reliable, with efficient scaling and minor regional issues, but SLAs need examination.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling should automatically scale out systems during high demand and scale in new instances when demand decreases.
The stability of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling rates a 10.
 

Room For Improvement

EC2 users seek affordable pricing, better AWS integration, enhanced support, easier customization, scalability, and improved interoperability with other systems.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling struggles with scalability, support, billing complexity, limited automation, connectivity issues, and inadequate training materials.
Integration with LLM would be beneficial as many services are implementing this functionality.
Amazon should provide more detailed training materials for people who are just starting to work with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling.
In enterprise environments such as healthcare or banking with numerous instances running different applications, customizable policies allow appropriate scaling.
 

Setup Cost

Amazon EC2 pricing is complex, with variable costs and options requiring careful planning to manage budgets and ensure cost-effectiveness.
EC2 Auto Scaling offers pay-as-you-go pricing, where costs vary by usage and region, with competitors varying pricing.
It operates on a pay-as-you-go model, meaning if a machine is used for only an hour, the pricing will be calculated for that hour only, not the entire month.
In some projects, incorrect decisions were made by not consulting them first, resulting in higher setup and maintenance costs.
 

Valuable Features

Amazon EC2 is favored for its scalability, reliability, cost-effectiveness, robust security, and seamless AWS integration with minimal setup.
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling offers seamless scalability, automatic provisioning, integration, security, cost-efficiency, and flexible management for diverse business needs.
The service offers 99.9999% availability. We have high availability, and I haven't experienced any downtime during my usage periods.
This pre-configuration makes on-demand scaling refined, and the configuration includes automatic traffic distribution because when the first system is overloaded, new incoming traffic is redirected to the newly created systems.
The best feature I appreciate about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is its health check functionality; when a server becomes unreachable or enters an unhealthy state, it automatically triggers an alert, and the load balancer responds by spinning up a new server, ensuring that traffic is distributed effectively.
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon EC2
Ranking in Compute Service
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
69
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling
Ranking in Compute Service
5th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Compute Service category, the mindshare of Amazon EC2 is 9.0%, up from 7.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling is 9.2%, down from 13.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Compute Service Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling9.2%
Amazon EC29.0%
Other81.8%
Compute Service
 

Featured Reviews

KatlegoMabila - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers customization and flexibility with great support
Scalability depends on whether the client wants to scale up or scale down. It decreases resources based on demand. The great aspect of scalability is the flexibility to allow business success to optimize resource solutions and cost efficiency. Another crucial aspect of scalability is auto-scaling. When you have the opportunity to auto-scale, it can't always be available for everything. If you have chosen to integrate with auto-scaling, it's marvellous and doesn't require additional effort. Auto-scaling gives you the edge by using the capacity you have efficiently, scaling up or down as needed. These flexibilities within the EC2 feature instances of AWS play a crucial role in helping me utilize AWS EC2 Intelligent efficiently.
Karthikeyan Ganesan - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers automatic scaling features but can improve user interface and setup guidance
Customizable policies help us determine how scaling should occur. In enterprise environments such as healthcare or banking with numerous instances running different applications, customizable policies allow appropriate scaling. For critical servers, we can set up a higher number of new instances to scale out to prevent downtime. For less critical servers that perform simple tasks such as file copying, we can use customizable policies to scale out minimal instances to avoid unnecessary expenses or cloud costs. Regarding integration, there are some disadvantages in AWS where certain availability zones or regions experience glitches. This can cause production halts because of problems on Amazon's side. In particular regions, when integrating Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling or other services, there might be delays in creating new Amazon EC2 instances, sometimes becoming inefficient.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Transportation Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Performing Arts
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business30
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise26
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise26
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Amazon EC2?
The scalability and elasticity are helpful.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2?
Advice on Setup Cost, Pricing, and Licensing for EC2: 1. Start Small & Use Free Tier if Possible For new users or small applications, the AWS Free Tier offers limited EC2 usage free for 12 mont...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2?
There are some specific features, such as ML features and AI features, that I would to see included in the next releases of Amazon EC2. Additionally, there is functionality available in Databricks ...
What do you like most about Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
The solution removes the need for hardware. We can easily create servers or machines. Just by clicking or specifying our requirements, like memory size or disk space, it's set up for us. The tool e...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
Regarding licensing and setup costs, we always study in detail using lower environments such as User Acceptance Testing or sandbox environments. Before creation, we consult AWS official documentati...
What needs improvement with Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling?
Current Auto Scaling is mostly reactive. Introducing predictive or AI-driven scaling could anticipate traffic spikes and improve responsiveness.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, EC2
AWS RAM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Netflix, Expedia, TimeInc., Novaris, airbnb, Lamborghini
Expedia, Intuit, Royal Dutch Shell, Brooks Brothers
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon EC2 vs. Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.